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The Great British Summer Game Jam, which ran from Saturday 5th – Sunday 6th July, saw over 12 teams competing from Mind Candy’s East London office and remotely nationwide, to create the best “British Summer” themed game. The aim being to encourage people into game development, promote the UK’s games industry and experiment with new technology and hardware donated by a variety of jam partners including Autodesk, Marmalade, Unity3d, Simplygon, Allegorithmic, PlayCanvas, PlayJam and AMD.

Developer Gianluca Sclano claimed both first place and the accessibility award for his game ‘Tapping on the Beach’, with second place going to ‘Sunshi*e’ by Godlike Team and third to ‘Go to Sheep’ by Josh Naylor.

Sclano, walked away with the GBSGJ trophy, a Game Stick console and a top of the range AMD graphics card. Runners-up, Godlike team, won a variety of prizes including 5 commercial Marmalade Dev licenses, a 12 month Pro Dev game license for PlayCanvas, a 12 month indie licence from Simplygon, Substance Painter and Designer licences from Allegorithmic and a range of books from 3D Total.

CTO of Mind Candy, Jeff Reynar said: “We were thrilled to take part in the Great British Summer Game Jam and impressed with the standard of games produced over the weekend. It is important to us to support creativity and innovation in gaming and the event gave us the perfect opportunity to do so with Autodesk. We are already looking forward to running another one in the future”

Kevin Booth, Sales development manager at Autodesk said: “I was amazed at the results of the Jam. With so many entries, I loved the ambition of those willing to adopt new technology, and obviously saw the application of gorgeous 3D visuals as a key driver for helping their game to stand out from the crowd! The level of enthusiasm, dedication and creativity on display throughout the weekend was genuinely inspirational, and the games were of an exceptionally high standard. It was great to see the teams’ 3D artists equipped with Maya LT, and using the indie-focused tools to develop some really compelling 3D artwork in such a short period of time. Great stuff!”

Ukie supported the ‘Accessibility Award’ for the game that was most accessible to those with impairments and disabilities which was also won by Sclano’s “Tapping on the Beach” game. Ukie’s award judge, accessibility consultant Ian Hamilton said: “I’m really glad to have been involved and judge the accessibility award on behalf of UKIE. The jam seems to have been a great success on all fronts, and one of the highlights for me was to see the common assumption that accessibility must be difficult and time consuming be so thoroughly disproved. It was fantastic to see so many developers enjoying experimenting with broadening their audiences, and I hope that’ll be something they can take back with them to their day to day development.”

CEO of Ukie, Dr Jo twist added: “We were thrilled to be supporting the Jam and help raise awareness of accessibility within games. It has been amazing to see the quality of games that were produced in such a short amount of time. It really does demonstrate the creativity, innovation and talent that UK developers offer”